[Israel Business Series] Getting Inside the Mind of a Hacker with Ido Safruti of PerimeterX

Ido Safruti is the Co-Founder and CTO of PerimeterX, a cybersecurity company that can detect and stop automated threats and helps to block malicious code. They began operations in 2014. Some of their solutions are PerimeterX Bot Defender™ and Code Defender, among others, which help to accurately protect companies’ websites across the digital enterprise, e-commerce, financial services, food delivery, travel and hospitality, and media industries. 

PerimeterX helps protect these websites from all types of automated or non-human attacks at any scale, including protection from infected code that can leak personal information. They’ve helped some of the world’s largest brands, including Zillow, Bill.com, Skechers, Godiva, and many more.

 

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

• How does PerimeterX help protect Zillow from comment spamming, phishing, and data scraping?
• Which businesses qualify for PerimeterX protection?
• Ido Safruti breaks down some common web attacks, how they occur, and what you can do to protect yourself
• How does a hacker think and operate?
• What the dark web is and what’s on there
• Ido shares the idea behind PerimeterX and why he and his co-founders started the company
• How the PerimeterX founders discovered and validated websites and web application vulnerabilities online prior to starting their company
• Ido talks about how they raised funds for PerimeterX and how they came up with the valuation for the company
• The lessons Ido learned about the role of technology in problem solving and the importance of hiring the right people
• One of the hardest decisions Ido had to make when he was in the Israeli Defense Forces
• Ido explains the difference between doing business in Israel and the U.S.

In this episode…

if you run a high traffic, high data collection, and payments processing business online, hackers may target your business and want to take over your online processes. They would want to steal your customer information, scrape and sell your sensitive data, run a Magaecart operation, and more.

Should you be worried? Yes, definitely, especially if you don’t have protection in place to secure your data. And this also applies to individuals who transact with online businesses–it’s imperative that everyone knows how to protect their data from hackers and their malicious activities.

In this episode of the Inspired Insider Podcast with Dr. Jeremy Weisz, the CTO and Co-Founder of PerimeterX, Ido Safruti takes you into the mind of the hacker. He reveals how hackers operate, where they operate from, the different types of vulnerabilities, and how you can protect yourself and your business. Stay tuned.

Resources Mentioned in this episode

• PerimeterX
• Ido Safruti on LinkedIn
• Omri Iluz on LinkedIn

Special Mentions: 

• Shoham Levy of Creativity Value on LinkedIn
• Jonathan Heiliger on LinkedIn

Related Episodes:

• Mois Navone of Mobileye on Inspired Insider
• Jonathan Medved, OurCrowd, on Inspired Insider
• Uri Adoni on Inspired Insider
• Elie Wurtman on Inspired Insider

Books mentioned:

• Silk Road by Eileen Ormsby

 

Episode Transcript

Jeremy Weisz

Dr. Jeremy Weisz here, Founder of InspiredInsider.com where I talk with inspiration entrepreneurs and leaders. You know, some past episodes You know, I think people should check out. I’ve been doing this Israel Business Series, and some of the people are just amazing. Mois Navone of Mobileye, he talked about Mobileye and their journey being acquired by Intel, for $15.3 billion. It had a lot of ups and downs and he shares some of the downs as well as the ups they’re some of the other interviews. Jonathan Medved, OurCrowd, Uri Adoni, who wrote The Unstoppable Startup, Elie Wurtman of Pico Venture Partners, just some amazing stories in that. So everyone, check out those episodes for sure and many more. And before I introduce today’s guest, this episode is brought to you by Rise25. Rise25, I co founded with my business partner, John Corcoran, we help businesses connect to their best relationships, their dream 100 relationships and partnerships, and we help you run your podcasts. And, you know, for me, Ido, relationships is the number one thing in my life. So I’m always looking at a way to profiling give to my best relationships. And I do that by allowing people to talk about their thought leadership in their company through the podcast and sharing with others. So if you’ve thought as a company, we should be doing podcasting and producing lots of content and connecting with amazing people and authorities in your space. Email us check out Rise25.com and email us at [email protected]. We’ve been podcasting since 2008 before people knew what a podcast was a lot of people. So today’s guest I’m excited to introduce you a big thank you to Shoham Levy of Creativity Value, where they help Israeli tech companies. He introduced me to today’s guests, and Ido Safruti. He’s Co-founder and CTO of PerimeterX. And that was started in 2014. PerimeterX. This is very fitting, I think, you know, cyber security is that Israeli cyber security company. I want Israeli security. Ido, like you basically have to ward off a lot of people and attacks in general as a country and especially there’s a lot of cyberattacks right now with so much stuff going on in e-commerce, but they can detect and stop automated threats and help to block malicious code. They have PerimeterX Bot Defender™, they have a Code Defender, and their products accurately protects commerce, media and enterprise websites from all types of automated or non human attacks any scale. It also can protect sites from infected code, they can leak personal information. They’ve helped some of the largest brands in the world, including Zillow, bill.com Skechers, Godiva and many more, you know, thanks for joining me here. So I want to start off with you know, one of these will go back to your roots, you know, which is Israeli Defense Forces, Prime Minister office, but I wanted to start off with like a Zillow How did you first start working with Zillow?

Ido Safruti

Like many cases, it’s I can’t even trace the initial link and probably some friend VC or someone with a customer, they had it when they started, they’re one of our oldest customers. They started by doing things repeatedly themselves trying to file kind of fraud. Initially, I think it was common fraud, then being in marketplace, comments and or a directory service for a lot of inventory. agents or other could have used comment to boost their their thing, but also there is just like fishing so people could comment with link that will more or less time and like space, or something, yes, found the site Exactly. And that furnishes the site score and things like this. They’re fighting it and they were looking for a solution for to fight this because it was mostly automated or the assumption was that it would be designed by someone automatically running and doing that. And that what started the engagement which ended up being something completely different like and this is what I love in this interview. Start trying to solve a specific problem we had an engine that will know how to detect humans versus bots. We went and, and looked at the specific use cases, loved the team, technically brilliant, implemented, understood the technology. Some things that we sighs some of this found that was upsetting was actually non non automated. I mean, sometimes it

Jeremy Weisz

was man how we’re going in

Ido Safruti

Yeah, you can have workshops of people where it’s cheap labor, and they can actually manually do that. And we help defend that. But once we were deployed and looking at their traffic, we identify what bots are doing that they weren’t necessarily aware of, or they had been fighting another department and show saw a lot of value. And as, as we grew with the, with the customer on looking on how to protect their accounts, how to protect their content from competitive scraping, obviously, they own a lot of valuable data of MLS and in other data, that they don’t want competitors to know if their pricing or doing that. And, and this is how we started.

Jeremy Weisz

Who should be using you know, I picture when I think of Zillow makes me think of what other sites get lots of traffic that probably has to deal with spam and comments and bots, just trying to infiltrate, like Craigslist comes to mind like, should all of these highly trafficked sites be using PerimeterX?

Ido Safruti

Yep. So definitely highly trafficked site. But not only how the lifetime if you your business is, if you have a significant amount of business done online. Attackers will try to, to find that I mean, because the way criminals or or cyber criminals are working, they’re trying to look for opportunity. If you’re making a lot of money on the side, then probably by them, hacking or frauding, or managing to do something to your site, they may find their own body, criminals are working for profit. They’re not, it’s not this romantic view that we have of this hacker in a hoodie sitting at night in the basement and trying to hack for the sake of hacking. More and more of them are actually organized companies working. In order to do that. certain countries are allowing that because it’s part of their economy, certain places are less organized, but still there, they’re doing it for the sake of revenue. So if there is a if you’re doing transactions online, if your your asset is your content, like Zillow, for instance, or if you’re a retail store, if you’re in travel, if you’re a financial institution, anyone who is doing online business that is significant. You can you can be sure that someone is targeting them with bots, someone will try to inject malicious code into that to steal data, because they can then monetize it what you know,

Jeremy Weisz

What level of business should someone consider PerimeterX? Like? Do they have to be doing X number of dollars or having X amount of traffic where it makes sense? Like what’s the Yeah, a good criterias people?

Ido Safruti

I think it’s a fair point. I mean, if you look at the overall cloud investment, if you’re investing more than a few $1,000 a month for your hosting costs, or your for your other investment, and again, in retail, if you’re making more than that a few millions or 10s of millions of dollars online from from sales, then you might become a target. If you’re too small, again, amongst pop shops around the corner that is opening a delivery service. There are less often an interesting target for attackers, it is going and becoming more commoditized because the attack tools are becoming more commoditized. So again, it’s all about both barrier to entry if if it cost me X amount of money to operate an attack. And there is an upside that the lower the attack cost, the more probably the problem will come.

Jeremy Weisz

what some of the craziest stuff you’ve seen.